Gravetemple“II”

Another day, another project of the sunn 0))) / Southern Lord extended family, another chance for me to dive blindly into the abyss and tumble down past the boiling fire pits and crags and super aggro crags to the stone lair where Attila Csihar keeps my heart in a jar of blackened formaldehyde. Many miles separate the all-star participants in Gravetemple — Stephen O’Malley [USA→Paris], Attila [Hungary], Oren Ambarchi, and Matt “Skitz” Sanders [Australia] — but the sessions we hear on Ambient/Ruin lose none of their power for having drifted across years and oceans and desktop audio workstations to our ears. What we get here is just what we’d expect from the musicians involved: churning acoustimatic field recordings, howls of torture, overdriven electronics, and the most chest-crushing hi-fi guitar drone on the market. If you think this all sounds a bit like Monoliths and Dimensions minus the horn and string arrangements (and Greg Anderson), you’re on to something: these neo-concrète doom-drone collages first emerged from the magma right around that time as a self-released demo CD-R in 2008.

Check out “II,” 17 minutes of sublime terror from Ambient/Ruin, below. Allow Csihar’s chants, Ambarchi’s motorized cymbals, and O’Malley’s classic 0)))-ing to pull you down to That Place — you’ll recognize it when you get there. And peep the cover art by the vbercvlt overlord himself, Justin Bartlett.